Today, companies packaging liquid food products face tough competition. The effect of this is that a high uptime for the processing equipment is necessary to stay competitive. Further, due to an increasing number of different products with different demands on the processing equipment, the processing equipment needs to be easy to modify in order to keep a high uptime.
Tubular heat exchangers are a common type of heat exchanger used for heat treating a liquid food product, such as milk and juice. In short, the liquid food product is fed through inner tubes running in a bigger pipe, a so-called shell, such that the liquid food product is heated by a heat transfer medium held within the shell. A compact design of tubular heat exchangers can be achieved by having bend pipes connecting sets of inner tubes to each other.
In order to reduce energy consumption an outgoing liquid food product to be cooled down before being stored may act as heat transfer medium. In this way, the outgoing food product to be cooled down is used for heating up an incoming food product to be heat treated in order to kill unwanted microorganisms.
Besides the advantageous compact design and the low energy consumption tubular heat exchangers can have a modular design making it possible to adapt the tubular heat exchanger for a specific product. For instance, Tetra Spiraflo™ marketed by Tetra Pak has inner tubes set held in place in the outer ends. By having this configuration, the inner tubes set may easily be removed by releasing the outer ends and pulling out the inner tubes set and thereafter be replaced by another inner tubes set. In this way an inner tubes set specifically made for a certain product can be chosen, for instance having diameters and corrugation pattern known to be suitable for the product.
Even though tubular heat exchangers of today are possible to be configured for specific products, there is a need for even further possibilities to adapt the tubular heat exchanger to specific products, particularly in ways that are quick such that a high uptime can be upheld.